The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies for Building a Learning Organization

THE BREAKTHROUGH STRATEGY by Robert H. Schaffer (1988,

occur when two functional teams, each responsible for a component or subsystem, want to optimize their work. In each case, the “quick fixes” to problems seem easy and effective at first, but they raise rivalry

Gridlock results when individual actors continue to behave as if they were independent of everyone else— each pulling in a different direction,

STEP 1: IDENTIFY THE ORIGINAL PROBLEM SYMPTOM Look back over a period of time and identify a class of symptoms that have been recurring.

codify your group intuition. You have created hypotheses about what has happened, and where opportunities for leverage might exist. Before committing yourself to any large-scale actions, run several small, relatively self-contained experiments.

This statistic (the percentage of prototypes leading to full production) would be an ideal indicator, but it had never been separated out in the financial statement. It only emerged from asking a question in a systemic context: “If profits are your problem, then where do your profits come from?”

you’ll see that what started as a “Fix That Backfired” was in fact a “Shifting the Burden” system. This revealed the need to focus efforts on the fundamental problem-correcting process (the left-hand side of the diagram).

a systems thinking effort suggested breaking the link from “marketing promotions” to “money available for new product development”: setting a policy that no matter how high the perceived need, promotions would not be funded out of the product development budget.*

Financial indicators—the way corporations normally measure success—tend to be useless here.